We often hear the comment,
"No IT Manager ever got fired for picking Java." Why is this?
Java is considered a safe choice because it can solve many problems and it has sufficient market penetration that it currently is not viewed as a risky choice.

I compiled the following in an attempt to show that no IT Manager should ever get fired for chosing Perl either.
I am not trying to write a justification for why Perl is the best choice for any given IT task.
Rather,
I believe the evidence listed below shows that it is a perfectly acceptable choice and should be considered on even ground with other possibilities.

Given this information,
a responsible IT Manager should proceed to select a language or programming platform based on things that actually matter like the task at hand,
the budget,
the current skills of the target coders,
the current environment,
etc.

Perl runs basic CGI and is the language that made CGI ubiquitous on the web.

mod_perl is an advanced implementation of Perl that runs in the Apache web server.
It provides extremely fast performance and full access to Apache internals via Perl.

DB interaction: Perl provides an excellent interface to nearly all available databases,
along with an abstraction layer that allows you to switch databases without re-writing all of our code.

re-usable code architecture (modules,
OO,
etc.): Perl is architected to allow and encourage re-use.
The core block of re-use,
the module,
makes it very easy to leverage business logic across platforms in web applications,
batch scripts,
and all sorts of integration components.

CPAN,
the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network,
is one of the largest repositories of free code in the world.
If you need a particular type of functionality,
chances are there are several options on the CPAN,
and there are no fees or ongoing costs for using it.

The main point of these stats is that Perl has a large and broad user community.
With any technology you choose,
you don't want to be the only one using it.
These numbers show that Perl is still widely used for web development,
among other things,
and the user community is very active.

Recent Bookscan stats show Perl at roughly three times the number of sales as Python,
ten times as Ruby,
and half as many as PHP.

O'Reilly Media is very much driven by numbers and they felt the Perl book market was strong enough that they published 4 new Perl titles last summer alone.
That is a large number of books for a relatively small tech publisher to devote to a single language.

Perl continues to be actively developed.
Many developers are working on Perl 6,
the next major version of the language.
At the same time,
dedicated teams continue to fix and augment the Perl 5.6,
Perl 5.8,
and Perl 5.10 releases.
Many companies would have de-supported these version rather than maintain them.
The fact that you can safely continue to use a production release of an older Perl without being forced to upgrade is a strong feature.